Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal unveils education reform plan

Gov. Bobby Jindal on Tuesday outlined a far-reaching set of proposals aimed at improving education in Louisiana, including a state-wide voucher program for low-income students, an expansion of autonomous charter schools and steps to link a teachers’ classroom performance to their job protections and their compensation. The governor has been promising for months now to make education reform the centerpiece of his second-term agenda.

[…]The voucher program may prove the most controversial aspect of the plan. Jindal is proposing to help pay tuition at private and parochial schools for any child of a low-income family who attends a school that receives a letter grade of C, D or F.

More than 70 percent of Louisiana’s public schools would fall into that category, opening up districts across the state to competition for public funding from private institutions. Parents who opt out of those public schools would be able to take the public funding set aside for their child with them to pay for tuition.

Voucher opponents argue that offering private school tuition siphons money away from public education, but the governor is framing the idea as a way to put decision-making in the hands of parents.

Also toward that end, Jindal is proposing to fast-track the approval of new charter schools for proven charter operators. Charters are publicly funded but privately managed and typically overseen by nonprofit boards. They compete with traditional public schools in their area for students.

Jindal is also proposing to end regular annual pay increases for teachers based on years in the classroom, ban the use of seniority in all personnel decisions and weaken the power that local school boards have in hiring and firing decisions in favor of superintendents.

Teachers coming into the classroom for the first time would also see major changes under Jindal’s plan: districts would have greater flexibility to establish their own pay scales for new teachers and tenure would be set aside only for those who earn high ratings on evaluations five years in a row.

I thought it might be helpful to also post this quick introduction to the issue of school choice, from the Cato Institute.

There’s an even longer video narrated by John Stossel that you can watch, that really explains the why school reform matters – and why it’s a conservative issue. Like the sex-selection abortion issue that I blogged about here before, this is an issue that conservatives need to seize on. Here, we can really let our compassionate side show by helping the poorest students, especially those in visible minorities, who simply cannot get a quality education in a public school monopoly that is not responsive to the needs of parents, or their children. This is an issue where we can win – the only losers are the educational bureaucrats and the teacher unions. But the kids are more important.

Quote:
In remarks made at the annual meeting of the Louisiana Association of Business and Industry, Jindal, just starting his second term in office, put tenure on the table as a reasonable idea that needs total makeover.

[…]Most effective teachers recognize that granting tenure automatically is a flawed approach, and they will respect the intent of Jindal’s proposal, which is this: “Make granting of tenure an active process rather than an automatic one so that tenure becomes a recognition given teachers who have demonstrated excellence, rather than merely survived for three years.”

That seems more than reasonable, and Jindal has plans about how to implement that equitably.

He also hopes to implement other important changes.

Among them: putting employment decisions in the hands of local superintendents, who are supposed to make such operational decisions, instead of with school board members, who should set policy and stay out of the day-to-day operations.

The recommendations — to many to recap here — are thoughtful and aggressive, and they deserve review by lawmakers who have a bias for action.

The details will challenge, but the goals must be met: Put a highly effective teacher in every classroom; give parents and students an equal opportunity in education; and give school leaders more flexibility to spend their dollars on policies that improve student achievement.